Downgrade Gentoo from testing to stable
At some point in my main Gentoo boxes life I added the ~amd64 keyword into my make.conf. I don't remeber why I did this, but I can't think of a reason I need my entire install to be bleeding edge.
I did some googling around on the best approach to achieve this and from what I read on forums, having a bunch of testing packages downgrade to stable is not such a good idea.
One reason might be that per app config files are usually only designed to be backward compatible, not forward compatible.
At any rate, the idea is to gather a list of currently installed testing packages and add them to package.keywords for their current version.
With this method, eventually those packages will become stable.
The method I used is basically from the sabayon wiki with a few tweaks.
First, edit make.conf ACCEPT_KEYWORDS to:
ACCEPT_KEYWORDS=amd64
Now use equery, sed and grep to construct a new packge.keywords
equery -C -N list -F '=$cpv $mask2' '*' | \ grep \~ | sed 's/\[~amd64 keyword\]/~amd64/' > \ /etc/portage/package.keywords/testpackages
Basically I added '-C' to remove colours and grep
Examine testpackages for sanity, and then test with a world upgrade.
emerge --ask --update --newuse --deep --with-bdeps=y @world These are the packages that would be merged, in order: Calculating dependencies... done! Nothing to merge; quitting.
Update
18 months since making this change I thought I'd see how many of the original
testing packages are still on my system. This little shell snippit uses equery
to check if a package listed in the testpackages
portage file made earlier is
still installed on the system, and if not, update the file with a #
in front.
for i in $(awk '/=/ {print $1}' testpackages)
do
if ! equery l "$i" > /dev/null;
then
sudo sed -ie "s/\(${i/\//\\/}\)/#\1/" \
testpackages
fi
done
After running this grep -c '^#' testpackages
shows 368 packages no longer
needed in here and conversely 118 are still required.